The Jire Olanlokun Educational foundation (JEOF) is an initiative to enhance and foster Educational excellence. JEOF was formed immediately after the exist of the iconic librarian, Late Dr Jire Olanlokun who was the then University librarian of the University of Lagos (UNILAG). A memorial lecture was set aside by the board of Trustee of the Foundation in honor of the late Dr Jire Olanlokun, which various lectures in his profession “Librarianship” has successfully held 11 lectures in its series.

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Yesterday dated September 7^th 2017, JEOF held another intriguing and inspiring lecture titled - LIBRARIES GOING GOLD AND GREEN: THE NIGERIAN EXPERIENCE delivered by Mrs. Bukky Olufemi Asubiojo (B.Ed, MLS, PGDE, FNLA), the former university librarian Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-ife (2011-2017 presently on sabbatical at Olabisi Onabanjo University).

 

OfficialGuru Media head was on ground to bring you this report. The lecture started as at 11:50 with Mrs. Asubiojo as she gave professionals, non –professional and invited guest her power point presentation, which highlighted the proliferation of online publication and issues of access to information which has led to Open Access Initiatives (OA).

Open Access initiatives were therefore developed to solve inaccessibility of information occasioned by high cost of scholarly publication or peer reviewed articles. It has also geared ensuring that research content are available, searchable and retrievable online, thus allowing data or statistics, information and knowledge within an article to be recycled and used freely by other researcher in need of such scholarly articles. Open access works are digital in nature according to Mrs.Asubiojo because after its first production, the cost of producing additional copies and making them available on the internet are marginal. The open access materials are freely available on the internet, thus it gives room for global society connect, which allow researchers to publish scholarly works without printing cost. Mrs. Asubiojo further emphasis on the two namely Open accesses which are the GOLD and GREEN and definitely this was the bone of contention in her presentation.

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   She explains the Gold Open Access implies, that the publisher has replaced the subscription or license  model with a model in which a researcher or his or her employer pays articles processing charge (APCS) to have an article published in a journal or through donations. The articles is then accessible online immediately after publishing to everyone worldwide via the publisher’s website free of charge while the Green Open Access, is also called self-archiving which requires scholars to deposit their referred journal articles in an institutional repository that conform to open archive initiative protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) thus conforming to such as she said mean the content of the electronic archive can be indexed by search engine and accessed by as many people as possible without any barrier. The Green open access do not performed peer review but simply make their contents freely available to the world while the Gold open access follows the same process of conventional publishing she said.

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She went on to highlight various beneficiaries of Open Access, which are namely: Readers around the globe can have barrier free access to latest literatures and research findings.

Authors get a worldwide audience larger than that any subscription based journal, no matter how prestigious or popular, and demonstrably increases the visibility and impact of their work.

Government gets promoted by OA as it fosters democracy by sharing non-classified government information as widely as possible.

Libraries pricing and permission crisis for scholarly journals are solves, thus also giving rooms for librarians to own and not license copies of electronic journals and archives them without special permission.

Universities benefit from their researchers’ increased impact and increase their university visibility on the web metric ranking.  Mrs. Bukky Olufemi Asubiojo also stress on the roles of libraries and librarians as facilitators and training agent of Open Access, thus strongly advocating for support of researcher to publish their articles for philanthropic reasons in open access oulets so that those who cannot afford subscription fee can have access to them. This initiative includes libraries like Online Open Access Catalogue (OPAC), Institutional Repositories (IR) and Open Access Journal Systems (OAJS). She also advice researchers to avoid hoarding information of findings or vital information, which might be useful for our country development.

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Many Academic and research institutions in Nigeria are completely unaware and unfamiliar with the open access initiatives, let alone its adoption, Awareness is very low, despite its inherent advantage , since librarians has not taken the issues of OA as a major concern. She gave her recommendations as she concluded her presentation by saying, readers and users of information shouldn’t reliable on all information found on the internet as its not reviewed not the less peer-reviewed, librarians needs special training in terms of Open Access Initiatives as they are seen as custodian of knowledge by its users, Budget should be set aside for Open Access Initiatives, provision of adequate facilities and government support because all will help in the developing of Nigeria Education and its Nation as a whole. In the concluding part of her presentation, she draws the audience attention to the forth coming intentional Open Access week 2017 with the Theme “Open in Order to----” which will hold from October 23^rd -29^th 2017, having the official hashtag #OAweek.

See more photos below:

photo with the BOT Chairman Dr. T.M Salisu